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Summary
Summary
In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.
In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South's large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.
Levine captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners' war; and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.
Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.
Praise for The Fall of the House of Dixie
"This is the Civil War as it is seldom seen. . . . A portrait of a country in transition . . . as vivid as any that has been written." -- The Boston Globe
"An absorbing social history . . . For readers whose Civil War bibliography runs to standard works by Bruce Catton and James McPherson, [Bruce] Levine's book offers fresh insights." -- The Wall Street Journal
"More poignantly than any book before, The Fall of the House of Dixie shows how deeply intertwined the Confederacy was with slavery, and how the destruction of both made possible a 'second American revolution' as far-reaching as the first." --David W. Blight, author of American Oracle
"Splendidly colorful . . . Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority born of decades of study." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author Notes
Bruce Levine is the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois. An associate editor of the Civil War magazine North and South, he has published three books on the Civil War era. The most recent of these, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War, received the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship and was named one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2005 by The Washington Post .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a deep, rich, and complex analysis of the period surrounding and including the American Civil War, University of Illinois historian Levine (Confederate Emancipation) compares the South to the House of Usher in Poe's famous story: the prosperous and powerful South looked invincible, but it had a flaw that made its collapse slow but inevitable. The social structure and very nature of the South was torn down and transformed in a matter of years. While Levine gives some attention to military actions, he primarily concentrates on slavery and its relation to the conflict; on Lincoln's attempt to avoid a "revolutionary, emancipationist" war, with the Emancipation Proclamation, in Levine's view, more a matter of practicality than principle; on the complex decisions regarding the newly freed blacks and their role in the war; and on the increasing desperation of a disintegrating Southern society. With a quarter of the text given over to notes and works cited, it's clear Levine has left no stone unturned to tell this story, and his argument is solid. For those interested in the social, political, and economic effects of the fall of slavery in America, this account is definitely enlightening. 16 pages of b&w photos. Agent: Dan Green and Simon Green, POM Inc. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This masterful work is essentially an examination of the political and social disintegration of the antebellum South under the strain of slow but relentless military defeat. Levine presents compelling evidence to counter revisionist arguments concerning the role of slavery in the South. He asserts that the entire edifice of Southern society was based upon the peculiar institution and the racial assumptions used to justify it. He effectively demolishes the mythology of a passive, even content slave population and illustrates how the maintenance of slavery depended on the threat and often the use of violence. Levine also acknowledges schisms in Southern society between the planter elite and the nonslaveholding majority. Once the military conflict began, the pillars of Southern society slowly eroded as men left the farms and plantations to fight and slaves refused to work and often fled into the arms of approaching Union forces. Levine's employment of testimonies by slaveholders, slaves, and pro-Union Southerners is effective and often poignant. This work will be an excellent addition to Civil War collections.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
The dramatic change in character imposed upon the US South as a result of the Civil War has long been the subject of serious scholarship. The destruction of the slave system, fall from power of the prewar elite, and transformation in identity of the common folk are all well-considered issues. Levine (Univ. of Illinois) may not offer a great deal of new material or groundbreaking analysis of these same subjects, but he does provide an easy read. The author relies heavily on secondary sources to support his conclusions, revealing the limits of this volume's usefulness in advanced coursework or graduate studies. His interpretation of the destruction of the antebellum social and political structure in the South conforms perfectly with current perspectives in popular culture, which will likely enhance the book's appeal in certain quarters. A lively narrative, almost completely unburdened by statistical analysis or excessive details, provides the volume a nice flow that will render it an accessible selection for virtually all readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Best suited for undergraduates and the general public. S. C. Hyde Southeastern Louisiana University
Kirkus Review
Levine (History/Univ. of Illinois; Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War, 2005, etc.) examines how the slaveholder republic of the Confederacy collapsed. Early on in this splendidly colorful account, the author compares the old South's disintegration to "The Fall of the House of Usher," where microscopic cracks in the mansion's foundation gradually widen until the building implodes. He extends the Poe-themed metaphor in a later chapter, invoking "The Masque of the Red Death," when the Confederate elite of Montgomery and Richmond madly partied at splendid balls in 1864-1865, even as their civilization lay in ruins. Levine acknowledges that a force of arms was necessary to bring the South to its knees, and he frequently alludes to military developments that marked the South's unfolding destruction. But how the confident exuberance of the secession spring turned into the bitter resignation of Appomattox is more than simply a story of battlefield reversals. War exposed Southern political, social and economic deficiencies in ways unanticipated by Confederate leaders. The increasingly bloody, expensive conflict shattered any number of illusions: about slaves' faithfulness, white Southern unity, cotton's supremacy, the unimportance of financial and industrial power, divine favor, unwavering martial spirit and Northern fecklessness. The war's stresses and strains widened fissures between Jefferson Davis' government and the economic elite, between master and slave, between plantation whites and the poor who shouldered a disproportionate share of the conflict's burdens. Ironically, the enslaved third of its population, second only to land as a source of Southern wealth and the war's proximate cause, emerged as Dixie's "greatest and most severe structural weakness." As the Northern armies advance in the background of his narrative, Levine recounts this tale of Southern institutional rot with the ease and authority borne of decades of study. A sensitive, informed rendering of the wrenching reformation of the South.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
An award-winning author and University of Illinois history professor, Levine portrays the Civil War as a revolution that radically altered the social, political, and economic institutions of the South. Among those most affected, of course: the newly freed slaves. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction In the middle of the nineteenth century, southern writers and politicians boasted often--and with considerable justification--that their states were the richest, most socially stable, and most politically powerful in the United States as a whole. Southern farms and plantations yielded handsome profits to their owners, who were some of the wealthiest people in the country, and the southern elite had also controlled all three branches of the federal government during most of its existence. At the root of this all this economic and political power lay the institution of slavery--an institution which, as the former slave Frederick Douglass would later recall, then "seemed impregnable." Few could then have imagined, he noted, "that in less than ten years from that time, no master would wield a lash and no slave would clank a chain in the United States." But what almost no one foresaw in 1860 is exactly what came to pass. In Mark Twain's words, the Civil War and its aftermath "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country." The most important and dramatic of these transformations was the radical destruction of slavery. One out of every three people in the South suddenly emerged from bondage into freedom, a change of such enormous significance and full of so many implications as almost to defy description. For the South's ruling families, meanwhile, the war turned the world upside down. It stripped them of their privileged status and their most valuable property. It deprived them of the totalitarian power they had previously wielded over the men, women, and children who produced most of the South's great wealth. "The events of the last five years," a Memphis newspaper editor summarized in 1865, "have produced an entire revolution in the entire Southern country. The old arrangement of things is broken up." The ex-Confederate general Richard Taylor lodged the same complaint that year. "Society has been completely changed by the war," he wrote. Even the stormy French revolution of the previous century "did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life." Abraham Lincoln applauded this "total revolution of labor" as "a new birth of freedom." Black South Carolinians cheered this "mighty revolution which must affect the future destiny of the world." Even as it upended society in the South, the Civil War era transformed the shape of national politics in the United States as a whole. Beginning with Lincoln's election in 1860, it finally broke the southern elite's once-iron grip on the federal government and drove its leaders into the political wilderness. Into the offices that planters and their friends had previously occupied there now stepped northerners with very different values, priorities, and outlooks. These new men used their political might to encourage the growth and development of manufacturing, transportation, finance, and commerce and thereby speed the country's transformation into the economic colossus familiar to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the hands of these same men, meanwhile, the post-Civil War federal government assumed key roles previously assigned to the states, including the power and the responsibility to safeguard the freedom and rights of the nation's citizens--citizens whose ranks now expanded to include millions of former slaves. Constitutional amendments adopted in the war's aftermath laid the legal basis for and pointed the way towards transforming the United States into a multi-racial republic. Relatively few people today are aware of just how all this happened. Although "the military movements connected with the Civil War are well known," a witness to those events commented decades afterward, "the great mass of American people know but little, and so think less" about the destruction of slavery and all that it entailed. That observation holds true after the passage of another century and more. The Fall of the House of Dixie was written to help fill that gaping hole in our collective memory. It traces the origins and development of America's "second revolution," explaining why it occurred and how it unfolded--especially how this great and terrible war undermined the economic, social, and political foundations of the old South, destroying human bondage and the storied world of the slaveholding elite. In recent years many scholarly books and articles have analyzed the Civil War's momentous consequences. But bookstore shelves allotted to the Civil War are to this day filled principally with detailed accounts of armies, officers, and the battles they fought, great and small. Nearly every major study of the Civil War as a whole--especially those aimed at a wide audience--continues to take the military story as its organizing principle and narrative spine. The Fall of the House of Dixie by no means ignores that subject. The slave-based society of the American South required powerful external blows to break it along its lines of internal stress. Union armies delivered those blows--blows that therefore make up a crucial part of the story told in this book. But the chapters that follow focus especially upon the transformation of that war from a conventional military conflict into a revolutionary struggle. And they emphasize the ways in which very different groups of people--slave owners, slaves, the great mass of slaveless southern whites, and soldiers both Union and Confederate, black as well as white--experienced and helped to bring about what one newspaper at the time called "the greatest social and political revolution of the age." Excerpted from The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce C. Levine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
